Syllabus - An Online Course About An Online Course

Open Metacourse for Online Instruction

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Jeff Hellmer and Bob Duke

Welcome to the Open Metacourse in Online Instruction (MOI). We were asked by Butler School Director Mary Ellen Poole to create this brief course for the faculty and teaching assistants in the Butler School of Music, but we've since received many requests to make this available to the wider UT Community. We're happy to do so. The content of our Metacourse is not tied to a specific discipline. Instead, we address principles of online teaching that are broadly applicable across the university curriculum.

Course Overview: We've set this up to be as simple, clear, and uncluttered as possible, and we designed the course with two goals in mind: first, to provide a brief model of an online course in Canvas that will allow you to experience some of the most important features of the platform for conducting courses online; and second, to provide brief learning experiences that will lead to your building the basic framework for your fall online course. Note the emphasis on brevity. Taking this metacourse should require no more than 90 minutes of your time, and when you've finished you'll have a good start on planning for the fall. We will not focus primarily on “how to use Zoom software” and other components of technology, although we've included a couple of supplementary videos about that in a supplementary module; instead we’ll focus on  principles of excellent instructional design that can be applied to online learning.

Our course is premised on the following central principle of effective learning: In order for learners to acquire information and develop skills that persist in memory, learners must generate information/explanations/demonstrations on their own. Effective learning requires effortful engagement beyond simply listening, watching, or reading. The so-called "generation effect" in learning has been observed in hundreds of investigations over the years and is a stable feature of our understanding of human learning.

Course Objectives (by the end of MOI you will be able to do the following in limited contexts):

The Big Idea: Create learning experiences that are characterized by students' generation of independent responses (e.g., answering questions, explaining ideas, solving problems, demonstrating principles).

1. Define the goals of your course in language that clearly indicates what students will do to demonstrate that they've accomplished the goals.

2. Create learning experiences that  (a)  present  new ideas, (b) pose interesting questions, problems, and other challenges, (c) provide opportunities for students to  work through challenges independently and collaboratively, and (d) provide feedback from peers and teachers.

Assignments: Fortunately, we don’t have to deal with grades! You're all getting As in this course, so relax. Our course is organized into four Modules. Completing the assignments in the modules is totally up to you, of course, but doing so should give you a good start toward your fall online course. We'll be happy to chat with you and look at your plans and materials and provide feedback if you'd like, but again that's totally up to you.

Sequencing: Our four Canvas modules cover:

Module 1 - Overview (the Module you're in right now)

Module 2 - Defining meaningful goals

Module 3 - Examples of effective module components

Module 4 - Building an effective module

We realize that all of you already know a lot about what we're going to talk about, so if we cover some ideas that for you have become second nature by now, please don't interpret that as lack of acknowledgement of your expertise. We're here to provide a little structure for your planning that might be useful to you. Feel free to reach out to either one of us at any time.